Best Friends Forever

‘The Interestings,’ by Meg Wolitzer

That misanthropic wag H. L. Mencken once wrote that his definition of happiness included “a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one’s fellow men” — something he suggested was more easily achieved in this country than elsewhere. And yet his quest to be exceptional (in which he inarguably succeeded) didn’t appear to make him all that happy, judging from his prodigious, grumbling output. But does the compulsion to excel make anybody happy? Or is it, rather, a prescription for disappointment in oneself and in the “circumscribed world”?

That’s the question that comes to preoccupy Jules Jacobson, the ambitious protagonist of Meg Wolitzer’s remarkable ninth novel, “The Interestings,” whose inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Marriage Plot.” “The Interestings” is warm, all-American and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas. Wolitzer has been writing excellent fiction for 30 years, and it has always been this astute. From the start, her subject has been the practical, emotional and sexual fallout of women’s liberation, particularly as it affects mothers and children. But here she has written a novel that speaks as directly to men as to women. With this book, she has surpassed herself. Just don’t call her exceptional.

Wolitzer’s heroines are typically daughters of the American sexual revolution who, like the author, were conceived around the same time as the birth control pill and who approached adolescence at a cultural moment that forced them to reckon not only with their own growing pains but with those of their mothers, who returned flush-cheeked from consciousness-raising groups to exhort their daughters: “You girls will be able to do just about anything you want.” Watching their mothers set about fulfilling their long-deferred dreams, these daughters didn’t necessarily rejoice in such parental empowerment, as Wolitzer observed in her 1988 novel, “This Is Your Life.” There the daughters sulked when their mother’s success kept her far from the home front. “My girls,” she implores them, “have I really hurt you so much? Don’t you know that I only try to do what I can?”

In Wolitzer’s 2008 novel, “The Ten-Year Nap,” Amy Lamb, another child of the E.R.A. era, remembers at 40 the jealousy and “shock” she felt in the 1970s when her mother converted a guest room into an office and shut the door to Amy and her sisters so she could work. (Note: Yes, Wolitzer fits that profile; her mother is the author Hilma Wolitzer.) Amy had quit her law job when she and her husband had a baby, staying home for one year, then two — a process Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook, described in a much-circulated speech as “quietly leaning back” (and which she argues against in her recent book, “Lean In”). Ten years later, Amy worries that she has leaned back too long, and frets about what she and women like her might have lost by opting out.

Photo

Meg WolitzerCredit
Nina Subin

In “The Interestings,” Jules Jacobson poses a broader question, asking herself what the boys (now men) and girls (now women) she has lionized since her teens, and emulated throughout her adult life, have lost through their persistent, rarely rewarded efforts to opt in. She wonders, in short, if all of them, male and female, have inaccurately defined success, believing they would only fit in once they stood out, would only matter if they were extraordinary. It’s Jules’s husband, Dennis, a man unafraid to call himself ordinary, who brings her to this realization. “Specialness — everyone wants it,” he tells her in frustration, fed up with her invidious comparisons to her childhood pals. “Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do — kill themselves?” Dennis’s heartfelt, exasperated cry snaps Jules out of the millstone mind-set she’s clung to for so long. Belatedly, she understands that she badly needs a new attitude.

In the summer of 1974, when she was 15, she had been granted a bunk in an exclusive summer arts camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods, escaping her gloomy, unglamorous existence in the New York suburbs, where her widowed mother and dour older sister dampened her thespian spirit. With frizzy hair, blotchy skin and an unromantic middle-class background, she felt like a pariah, “a dandeliony, poodly outsider.” The other campers seemed suave, polished and mysterious, “like royalty and French movie stars with a touch of something papal.” They were rich, they were from Manhattan.

One of them, Ethan Figman, was a genius at animation; he would grow up to create a famous television show. Another was Cathy Kiplinger, a gifted dancer who, despite her graces, would “end up sitting in a swivel chair all day, reading spreadsheets,” a fate none of them would have predicted. Another was a doe-eyed, delicate guitarist, Jonah Bay, whose early promise had been stunted (not that anyone suspected) by a toxic friend of his famous folk singer mother. The last two were beautiful, wealthy siblings, Ash and Goodman Wolf. Ash (the sister) would direct theater one day (with an assist from her husband’s money); Goodman’s talent was less specific — Warren-Beatty-power charisma that might eventually find an outlet . . . or not.

Jules worshiped this teenage “Who’s Who” among the tepees and, miraculously, they returned the favor, tapping her to join their clique, which they named “The Interestings.” They toasted their new-formed club with vodka and Tang cocktails, and rechristened this new member, formerly known as Julie. “She was Jules now, and would be Jules forever,” she thinks, drunk on her glamorous new possibilities.

The Interestings changed Jules’s life or, rather, changed her idea of the trajectory her life ought to take. From them, she absorbed the impression that the “only option for a creative person was constant motion — a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.” Again and again, she tries to keep going forward, hitting a wall in her mid-20s that makes her ask Ethan, the most precociously successful member of her clique, “How long do I put myself out there?” and “When do I stop?” One day Ethan will address a rapt throng at a Mastery Seminar (Wolitzer’s evocation of a TED conference), but the ensuing decades show Jules how hard and rare it is for anyone to make it to center stage, much less stay there. “The ones who kept up with it — or maybe the one who kept up with it — would be the exception,” she realizes. “Exuberance burned away, and the small, hot glowing bulb of talent remained, and was raised high in the air to show the world.”

This theme of self-invention is the subject of most of the great American novels, from “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to “The House of Mirth” to “The Great Gatsby.” Enveloping and thoughtful, Wolitzer’s novel describes this process in a fresh and forgiving way. She allows her characters to come to see happiness not as getting what they thought they wanted, but wanting what they’ve wound up having — a definition in which succeeding doesn’t require exceeding. “You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation,” Jules tells herself. “You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.” Now there’s an interesting idea.

THE INTERESTINGS

By Meg Wolitzer

468 pp. Riverhead Books. $27.95.

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

A version of this review appears in print on April 21, 2013, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Best Friends Forever. Today's Paper|Subscribe